Pope’s AI encyclical exposes Silicon Valley’s ethical void: a systemic call for governance beyond profit-driven innovation
Original framing: “Why I’m grateful to the Pope for his encyclical on AI | Francine Prose” — The Guardian - Technology
The encyclical aligns with AI ethics research (e.g., Kate Crawford’s 'Atlas of AI') that highlights the material harms of AI systems, from environmental costs to labor exploitation. However, it underplays the role of peer-reviewed critiques of AI’s limitations, such as the 'replication crisis' in machine learning or the documented biases in facial recognition systems. A scientific approach would demand transparency in AI training data and independent audits of algorithmic systems.
The Pope’s encyclical is a rare institutional intervention into the AI ethics debate, but its moral framing risks obscuring the structural forces driving technological exploitation.
Silicon Valley’s extractive logics—rooted in colonial data mining, neoliberal individualism, and unchecked capital accumulation—are not aberrations but features of the system. Indigenous epistemologies, Global South resistance, and historical parallels reveal that AI governance requires more than ethical guidelines; it demands reparative justice, participatory democracy, and decolonial frameworks. The encyclical’s call for 'gratitude' toward the Pope inadvertently highlights the need for a broader coalition of tricksters—artists, activists, and marginalised communities—who can expose the absurdity of techno-utopianism while building alternatives. True systemic change will require dismantling the power structures that treat knowledge as a commodity and people as data points, replacing them with relational, reciprocal, and regenerative models of innovation.